The Story of an Artwork by Lex Marie, Now Available for Collecting.

For Lex Marie, materials carry memory.

A multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and painting, Marie explores how Black childhood is shaped by adultification, discipline, surveillance, and systemic inequity. Rooted in her lived experience as a Black mother, her practice transforms everyday and reclaimed materials (such as school uniforms, pencils, belts, report cards, and hospital blankets) into charged objects that reveal the hidden curriculum embedded within systems of care and control.

“Deconstructed Black Maternal Health Flag examines the intersections of race, motherhood, and systemic inequity in American healthcare. Constructed from hospital receiving blankets, the divided flag evokes the incision and separation of a cesarean section while simultaneously disrupting the familiar symbol of the American flag. Rope stitches the sections back together, representing both the physical realities of childbirth and the continued effort to repair a healthcare system that has historically failed Black mothers,” Marie shares.

During her residency at McColl Center, that material language found its way into a new medium: printmaking. Working alongside Collaborative Printmaking Apprentice Caroline Wingerd, Marie began developing a print that translated ideas central to her larger practice into the possibilities of the print studio.

The print that Lex Marie created is now available for collecting. Learn more about this limited edition offering.

Collaborative printmaking is, by nature, an exchange. The artist brings their own visual language, ideas, and ways of making; the collaborative printmaker brings an intimate knowledge of process and an ability to help translate those ideas through a new medium. What emerges is developed together through conversation, experimentation, proofing, and revision.

For an artist like Lex Marie, whose practice relies so deeply on the histories and associations carried by familiar materials, that translation opens another way of thinking about how an image or object can hold meaning. Printmaking introduces its own language of repetition, layering, pressure, and reproduction, allowing an idea to shift as it moves from one material process into another.

Together, Marie and Wingerd worked through that process, bringing their respective knowledge into conversation and allowing the print to develop through experimentation in the studio.

Pictured: Lex Marie in studio during her residency at McColl Center in May 2026.

The collaboration reflects something central to McColl Center’s Residency Program: providing artists not only with time and space to make, but opportunities to expand their practices through access to new processes, equipment, and people.

An artist may arrive with a clear visual language, but a residency also creates room to ask: What else can this become?

For Lex Marie, one answer emerged in the Printmaking Studio.

Lex Marie’s limited-edition print Black Maternal Health Flag is now available to collect. Measuring 30 × 22 inches, the screenprint is printed on 250 gsm Fabriano Unica paper. Signed and editioned in pencil. Limited edition of 100.

Early collectors are invited to acquire the edition at a special release price of $350, offered in recognition of their early support of the work and the artist. The early collector price is only for the first 30 days, and then the price increases to $400.

Hear more about Lex Marie's process in this episode of Artist Unscripted, our video series that invites you into artists’ studios for relaxed, candid conversations. Each episode features a sit-down between an artist and our Director of Engagement, Makeia Carrier, offering an unscripted look at process, practice, and the realities of making art work.

And don't forget to enjoy Lex Marie's work, alongside other McColl Center Artists-in-Residence, in Sown Together: New Voices in Contemporary Textile Art, a collaborative exhibition presented by The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture and McColl Center, opening September 11, 2026 at The Harvey B. Gantt Center.

Hear more about Lex Marie's process in this episode of Artist Unscripted, our video series that invites you into artists’ studios for relaxed, candid conversations. Each episode features a sit-down between an artist and our Director of Engagement, Makeia Carrier, offering an unscripted look at process, practice, and the realities of making art work.

And don't forget to enjoy Lex Marie's work, alongside other McColl Center Artists-in-Residence, in Sown Together: New Voices in Contemporary Textile Art, a collaborative exhibition presented by The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture and McColl Center, opening September 11, 2026 at The Harvey B. Gantt Center.

All images on this page by Jalen Marlowe.